The Taliban has carried out several attacks on Western targets, including the United States and Germany: a suicide attack on the Bagram airfield near the capital Kabul, in which four people died, and the two-day attack on the German consulate, in which six people were killed and more than 100 wounded, in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Although according to the country’s sources, those affected by the attack in Mazar-i-Sharif were mainly Afghans, it seems that the Taliban Movement is developing these attacks in retaliation for Western actions in the country. The attacks by the Afghan army last week, with US air support, killed at least 32 civilians in an operation against a group of Taliban who had gathered north of the city of Kunduz.

Bagram’s attack is the most significant attack this year on a NATO facility in Afghanistan where the Atlantic Alliance maintains about 12,000 troops (9,800 are Americans) on a mission to support and train Afghan forces. Fifteen years after the US invasion, the Taliban have been strengthened to control a third of the country, according to US sources. This advance coincided with the end of NATO’s combat mission, which ended on January 1, 2015. However, escalating violence has prompted President Obama to extend the presence of US troops to at least 2017 .

The United States goes beyond the idea that if, after its withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, it had left 10,000 soldiers as a reliable reserve, making analogy to the Afghan case, to maintain stability in that country, there would have been no Emergence of the Islamic State as such. Therefore, the US is worried that a similar situation can develop in Afghanistan: there is already a strip controlled by the Islamic State in the province of Nangarhar in the southeast of that country.